Since 1996 Texas has had a law on the books guaranteeing admission to any of the state's public higher education institutions for any student graduating in the top ten percent of his or her high school class. The law is credited with remarkable results in enhancing diversity at the state's most prestigious public institutions, and students admitted under the rule consistently outperform those who are not, yet state legislators have repeatedly tried to kill the bill. The latest attempt is expected to pass the state Senate today.Legislators want to kill the ten percent rule mainly because of its impact on the state's flagship, the University of Texas at Austin. There, the percent of students admitted under the ten percent rule has climbed rapidly, from 43.2 in 2000 to 69.9 in 2008. This prompted Texas at Austin's president to write in an op-ed last fall, without any sense of irony, that, "if this trend continues unchecked...we will be required to admit more than 100 percent of our class under this rule." He also warned, in reminiscence of the Washington Monument Gambit, that the rule may force the school to cut its football program.
The original bill was intended as a way to expand diversity without imposing quotas, and it's worked. At the same time more students have been admitted under the rule, Austin's racial/ ethnic diversity has improved. For some context, consider that black and Hispanic graduates make up 48.9 percent of all Texas high school graduates, but only 20.5 percent of the enrollment at UT-Austin. In the last eight years, thanks mostly to the ten percent rule, black and Hispanic enrollment has begun to close that gap.
This would all be some feel-good diversity policy if the ten percent students failed to produce results. In fact, they earn higher freshmen grades and stay in school and graduate at higher rates than students accepted by all other methods, even ones with higher SAT scores. In other words, the ten percent admissions policy does a better job of screening applicants than the university's own admissions office.
What this really is, like plans in other states, is a ploy to get more students in from certain in-state locales. The ten percent rule has opened UT-Austin to students from all over the state and from high schools that never used to send students there. At the same time, coveted spots have been lost from suburban and wealthier areas. Legislators who want to kill or reduce the ten percent rule primarily come from these districts.
To end the rule would be short-sighted. There would be no stopping the institution from deciding that it needed more out-of-state students, who pay more tuition, to cover expenses. There are already headlines like, "Texas May Allow More Marylanders Into UT." Moreover, the policy creates a sense that Texas higher education institutions are for Texans. It creates buy-in with state taxpayers and legislators that the higher education institutions they finance are opening their doors to students from across the state. Hopefully the Texas Legislature continues to see the policy's merits.
1 comment:
This is questionable:
"This would all be some feel-good diversity policy if the ten percent students failed to produce results. In fact, they earn higher freshmen grades and stay in school and graduate at higher rates than students accepted by all other methods, even ones with higher SAT scores. In other words, the ten percent admissions policy does a better job of screening applicants than the university's own admissions office."
Can you provide the empirical basis for this? I'm interested in seeing the numbers themselves.
It seems to me that your last statement -- that the ten percent admissions policy does a better job than the admissions office -- is almost surely an misreading of the evidence. No one is disputing that many of the best college prospects are in the top 10% of their classes; many of these people would be accepted anyway, under any system. It's unreasonable to compare everyone in the top 10% to people outside the top 10% who had good SAT scores, and declare that since the former does better than the latter, a crude cutoff is more predictive than the admissions department's evaluation. To get a real sense, you'd have to limit your sample to those in the top 10% who would have been rejected if not for the 10% policy -- and I suspect that the outcome for that group is a lot different.
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